so right now i'm working on a game the I'd say is something like Dwarf Fortress, but is considerably dumbed down. Right now i've terrain generation that gives me terrain height, temperature and the resources that correlate from those two variables. namely food, wood, stone and ore. thats all stored in 3 matrices. i was wondering if there was a more efficient method because the matrices really eat up my memory

If the data is all integers from 0 to 255, you can use the asm tool DataString and that will compress a list to 1/9 of the size (and can be used to decompress it as needed). Otherwise, I am not too knowledgeable about BASIC methods of compression, but if they are just integer values, I know of a way to compress and decompress the data as you need in BASIC. The problem is that it is relatively slow and can cause a slowed loading time.

Every three entries corresponds to a new row. The only problem is that you need to know the size of the matrix ahead of time (if that is indeed a problem).
Also, I'm not sure if that actually takes up less room.